A priority for the rising number of food aid organisations is to cut the
millions of tons of goods we throw away

Food banks have forced their way into the national consciousness with a bang; cometh the recession, cometh the visual cliché. They are now a staple of TV news bulletins, national and local. Their appeal as shorthand for what the recession is doing to people has proved irresistible to TV news editors. Can you think of a neater way of illustrating hard times than to show mums queuing for food hand-outs? No, me neither.

The high profile of food banks is not due to fade any time soon. This Wednesday, Labour has selected them for an Opposition day debate in Parliament. And there’s a newly formed All Party Parliamentary Group – convened by the Labour MP Frank Field – that will keep the pot bubbling.

Meanwhile, the grocery trade has woken up to food banks: a couple of weekends ago, Tesco sponsored a national Neighbourhood Food Collection run in conjunction with the Trussell Trust (the charity that acts as organiser and cheerleader for food banks).

As someone who helps to run a sustainable food bank in Oxford, I find myself observing all this with a mixture of satisfaction and cynicism. Satisfaction because food banks are per se a good thing, cynicism because of the way they have become freighted with a political gloss.

The narrative that usually accompanies food-bank stories should be treated with caution. Statistics that claim to prove unprecedented and increasing food poverty need to be un-picked to understand a wider picture. Furthermore, the food-bank movement should be wary of being co-opted by an economic narrative with a political edge.

It would be foolish to deny that there are more people on the breadline today than at the height of the Great Boom of the early Noughties. How could it be otherwise? People have lost jobs, their pay has been cut, the benefits system is not so generous as used to be. Naturally, more people today are feeling pinched and the household food budget is under strain.

But gauging the real level of food poverty – a cant phrase that claims, wrongly in my view, that there is a special type of poverty which relates solely to food – is far from straightforward.

The first complicating factor is the sheer increase in the number of food banks. Ten years ago, there were hardly any; today there are more than 400 and new ones open every couple of days. So the figures about increasing demand – the Trussell Trust says that usage has trebled in the past year – must reflect, in part at least, the increasing availability of food banks.

To put it another way, a new service is being offered to more and more communities – and, naturally, people are using it. What is more, the sustained media interest in food banks has acted as a kind of giant pro bono advertising campaign; suddenly everybody knows about them.

And it invites the question: is food poverty really worse today than 10, 20 or 30 years ago? There are no statistics to prove the point. The food banks, in Britain, are too recent a phenomenon to allow a proper statistical comparison of that kind. As there were none in the recessions of the Seventies of Eighties, who can say what then was the true level of need? My suspicion is that there were more people suffering worse poverty in those threadbare years.

This is not to devalue or belittle the efforts of the donated-grocery model of food banks and the generous people who organise and give to them. They have grown rapidly in number precisely because they represent a practical and humane expression of human solidarity and charity. People have responded enthusiastically because food banks satisfy the charitable instinct.

But food banks should not only be about food poverty. Government critics and Opposition politicians claim that it is a cause for national shame that we have them at all. In fact, I believe, they are a good thing with the potential to play a constructive long-term role in the wider campaign for sustainability.

There is a striking irony in the current debate over food poverty which is that at the same time as people agonise over how to feed the poor, thousands of tons of wholesome food are thrown away every day.

The statistics for waste are staggering – and an affront to common sense and human decency. In Britain, 15 million tons of food is wasted annually. Nearly half is thown away by us in our own homes, but farmers, manufacturers and retailers account for the rest.

In a welcome gesture of openness, Tesco last month admitted that in the first six months of 2013, the company threw away nearly 30,000 tons of food. There is no legal requirement for companies to publish this kind of data, but you can bet that the other big retailers do no better.

So wouldn’t an impartial observer looking at food poverty and food waste wonder why it is that a society like ours cannot organise itself so that “surplus food” (the preferred industry term) is used to feed the hungry? It seems obvious.

What is more, it is already being done. In Oxford, a food bank was started up four and a half years ago, based on a sustainable model. Fresh food – bread, fruit and vegetables and dairy produce – is collected daily from local wholesalers and retailers and then distributed to charities in the city and surrounding towns.

The organisation – which is run by about 100 unpaid volunteers – has grown rapidly to the point where today it is giving away more than £2,000 worth of food a day to nearly 50 local charities. In bulk terms, that’s more than three tons a week, worth in cash terms in a full year about £750,000.

As an example of the much-disparaged “Big Society”, it could hardly be bettered. The volunteers – who span the age range from student to pensioners, come from every background and represent every political hue – have co-operated to build an organisation with local roots, serving local needs, without any subsidy from state sources whatsoever. And which is saving food from being wasted.

Collecting store-cupboard groceries and giving them away to families is a decent thing to do. The Trussell Trust will get a stockpile of food to give to poor families.

However, when people buy groceries to donate to food banks, they also increase supermarket sales. And while shoppers are encouraged to buy a bit more to help the needy, around the back of every store, every day, good food will be thrown away. If the big grocery chains are sincere about wanting to combat food poverty and serious about reducing food waste, does the Oxford project not offer a compelling solution?

The equation really is this simple: food poverty plus food waste can cancel each other out. All that’s needed is to match need with surplus.

On the Trussell Trust website, executive chairman Chris Mould, says that food poverty in a rich country is a national scandal. He says the situation is getting worse and lambasts the Government for the lack of a policy response. In doing so, the Labour-supporting Mr Mould is clearly making a political point.

But this kind of argument reduces food banks to mere ammunition in the wider economic debate. Given that food banks need the support of people with every political allegiance – and none – the last thing they need is to become politicised.

With a little official encouragement, some determined action by the retailers and food industry, combined with local initiatives, every town and city in the country could have a sustainable food bank on the Oxford model.

That would be a truly creative policy response that would make a lasting contribution to combating food poverty and reducing waste. And, because there will always be poor people who don’t get enough to eat, regardless of the state of the economy, it would lay the foundations of a more intelligent approach to waste and hunger in the future.

Robin Aitken is a co-founder of the Oxford Food Bank; the views expressed are not made on behalf of the OFB